So for Stockport Council to force food outlets to withdraw salt from view is daft. Any council official turning up at a fish and chip shop to check the ban is being enforced rigorously may run the risk of getting battered.

So is salt going to be 'banned' and 'removed' from all chip shops by 'force', because of a 'diktat'? Not quite:

Someone took a photo of the house and posted it on Twitter. Jimmy Carr saw it and passed it on to his followers. Some papers then ran the photo, making it yet another 'news story' originating from Twitter. But the Mail added the all important question:

Do you know a house which looks like someone famous? Phone the Daily Mail tnewsdesk [sic] on...

The Sun, meanwhile, didn't need to ask a question in this headline because it was sure that this happened:

Somehow, there have been seven articles (so far...) in the nationals about this nonsense, each one including a video which claims to be evidence of the 'poltergeist' moving a chair. It's not.

The Mail’s focus on saucepans may give the impression that saucepans or other household objects were analysed in this study. However, the study actually assessed levels of PFCs in people in the US whose drinking water may have been contaminated with high levels of the chemicals...

These findings do not prove that PFCs cause early menopause, and they need to be interpreted with caution. The study has several limitations, and further, high-quality research is required to assess whether PFCs affect human female hormones.

And:

The findings of this large cross-sectional analysis should be interpreted with caution. It is not possible for this kind of study to prove that PFCs cause earlier menopause. As the authors point out, it is possible that the findings are due to “reverse causation” and that PFC concentrations were higher in postmenopausal women because they are no longer losing blood through menstruation. This possibility is supported by the fact that women who had had hysterectomy had higher-than-average levels of PFCs compared with those who had not (although as the authors say, this might still be cause for concern).

In addition, the information about the menopause came from survey data carried out by a separate company. The data was not independently confirmed.

The researchers only looked at whether women had gone through menopause, and they categorised these women into one of three different age brackets they belonged to at the time of the survey. As such, the study cannot tell us how old the women were when they reached menopause and whether those who had early menopause (i.e. before the age of 40 or 45) were associated with higher PFC levels.

In February, the Mail, Telegraph, Richard Littlejohn and others claimed that Suffolk Police were happily displaying the rainbow flag for LGBT History Month but were totally 'forbidden' from ever flying the Union Flag.

The Press Complaints Commission received two complaints about the Mail's article. The PCC took the view that these were third-party complaints and so would not 'examine' them under the terms of the Code. But they had gone to the trouble of asking Suffolk Police if they wanted to pursue a complaint, but the constabulary decided against it.

Here's the PCC's full ruling (sent to this blog by one of the complainants):

The complainants were concerned that the claim the Union Flag had been banned by the Chief Constable of Suffolk was inaccurate. A spokesperson for the police had confirmed on Anglia TV that this was not correct and that both the rainbow flag and Union Flag were flown outside the police headquarters.

The Commission fully acknowledged the concerns raised by the complainants in regard to the accuracy of the article. However, the Commission generally only considers complaints from those directly affected by the matters about which they complained.

In this instance, the article related directly to the Suffolk Constabulary and as such, the Commission would require its involvement in order to come to a view on the matter. It had therefore proactively contacted the police force, which had been aware of the article but had decided not to make a formal complaint about it.

While it emphasised that the concerns of the complainants were indeed legitimate, it did not consider in the absence of the participation of the police that it was in a position to investigate the matter, not least because it would not be possible to release any information about the outcome of the investigation or resolve the matter without the input of the Suffolk Constabulary.

That said, it recognised that the complainants had provided information which had a bearing on the accuracy of the claim made in the article and, as such, it requested that the newspaper would take heed of the points raised in the complaints and alter the article accordingly. In light of the police’s decision not to pursue a complaint against the newspaper, the Commission could not comment on the matter further.

So clearly the PCC agrees the story is rubbish. It seems quite obvious it breaches the Code of Practice clause on accuracy. Yet all the PCC have done is to have:

requested that the newspaper would take heed of the points raised in the complaints and alter the article accordingly.

Given that the PCC said they were not going to deal with the complaint formally, that is, perhaps, more than they might have done.

But as yet, the Mail have not taken heed of this request. Hopefully they will - although there appears to be no sanction for ignoring it.

And would an 'alteration' (which would be difficult, given the whole article is about the Union Flag 'ban') to the story, done without fanfare, matter two months later anyway?

UPDATE: The Mail have done more than 'alter' the original article - they've removed it completely. They've also edited Littlejohn's column to remove his reference to the ban. Yet in neither case have they explained why - there appears to be no clarification or apology. This way, they can just pretend they never said it in the first place.

On Monday, March 28th, 2011, PWS was quoted on the front of the Daily Telegraph with the headline 'A Barbeque August'. On the inside of The Sun, their headline read 'Summer Washout'. So two newspapers, with two different interpretations...Whilst the Daily Star also followed the path of the Daily Telegraph, the only two newspapers which seemed to have the balance correct, and indeed the quotes correct, were the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, who quite rightly went along the lines of a mixed June and July, with August possibly[their emphasis] offering the best of the weather. If you can see the word 'barbeque' in our August forecast, please let us know.

No one with a shred of humanity can fail to be moved by some of the pictures coming out of Japan, whether an elderly woman being rescued from the rubble or frightened, bewildered schoolchildren waiting in vain for parents who will never return.

The devastation is on a biblical scale. Comparisons have been drawn with the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But:

Despite filling our homes with Japanese electronics and our garages with cars made by Nissan and Toyota, despite the vivid images on TV and assorted social networks, it remains a faraway country of which we know little and understand less.

Anyone who has visited or worked in Japan will tell you it is like landing on another planet. Beyond the baseball caps and Western clothes, the Japanese people have a distinct culture of their own, which is entirely alien to our own values. They are militantly racist and in the past have been capable of great cruelty.

Clearly Littlejohn was so moved by the devastation, when he came to write about it a week or so later, he thought he'd label the whole country as not just racist but 'militantly racist' and then mention the war. 'Shred of humanity' indeed. (In the online version, the subs have even included a picture of two emaciated prisoners of war.)

Of course, when Top Gear got into trouble recently for calling Mexicans 'lazy, feckless and flatulent' the Mail called this a 'slur' and an 'insult' and churned out six (very similar) articles about it within five days.

So, if the BBC makes jokes about all Mexicans or one Japanese man, it's an 'insult'.

If a Mail columnist says with a straight face that the 'Japanese people' - presumably all 125 million of them - are 'militantly racist', then that's, apparently, acceptable. To the Mail, it's 'powerful and provocative'.

He drags into this column his wife's dead grandfather, who had suffered as a POW and:

would never have joined a minute’s silence for Japan...Were he alive today, he would have remained doggedly in his seat if requested to stand in silent tribute to the dead of Japan.

Which may or may not be true - since he's dead, we'll never know. Yet when some people remain seated when asked to stand in tribute to one person who is alive, the Mail gets angry.

Littlejohn uses his wife's grandfather as a way to rant about when we should pay tribute:

I often wonder what our fathers and grandfathers would have made of modern Britain’s ghastly cult of sentimentality and vicarious grief.Ever since the hysteria surrounding the death of Lady Di, when half of the nation seemed to take leave of its senses, a section of the population seizes any excuse for a sobfest.

Showing ‘respect’ has become institutionalised. Before every one of the weekend’s Premier League football matches, for instance, fans were forced to stand and observe a minute’s silence for Japan. Why?

Why? Because over 9,000 human beings were killed and over 13,000 are missing, perhaps? But to him, a minute's silence for those people is 'any excuse for a sobfest' and part of a 'ghastly cult of sentimentality'?

'Showing ‘respect’ has become institutionalised.' How awful.

And 'forced'? More likely they were asked to, and thought it an appropriate thing to do.

Littlejohn explains:

I have no objection to honouring the dead in public, if the occasion or sense of loss warrants it.

For example?

At White Hart Lane we’ve recently said goodbye to some of the stars of Spurs’ double-winning side from the Sixties. There was genuine sadness over the loss of men many in the crowd had known personally.But how many of the hundreds of thousands of supporters corralled into grieving for Japan could even point to that country on a map?

So silent tribute to a few footballers is 'warranted'. But for tens of thousands of victims of a natural disaster?

...an excuse for a self-indulgent display of cost-free compassion.

He really doesn't seem to be able to grasp that people might feel 'genuine sadness' over the deaths of those we may not know personally.

He uses this to launch into a slightly strange attack on the Premier League:

Like most monsters, the Premier League has a sickening streak of sentimentality. Barely a week passes without yet another minute’s silence before kick-off...Of course, there is a commercial incentive here for the Premier League. No doubt the Japanese TV rights are up for renegotiation soon.

But there were silences before last weekend's Six Nations rugby games. And before football games elsewhere so this isn't just a Premier League, or even just a British, thing.

Then comes a paragraph of such mind-numbing nonsense, it's little wonder Littlejohn has a reputation for being less than rigorous with his research:

But why Japan and not, say, those massacred in Rwanda or starved to death by Mugabe in Zimbabwe? I don’t remember a minute’s silence for Haiti, although I may be mistaken. I’m sure we didn’t have a minute’s silence for our earthquake-hit Commonwealth cousins in Christchurch, New Zealand, before the Milan game. Maybe we did.

Firstly, it takes some nerve for him to invoke 'those massacred in Rwanda' when he said about the genocide there:

'Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.'

At around noon on July 8 on behalf of Prime Minister Koizumi currently visiting the United Kingdom, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hosoda visited the British Embassy in Tokyo to express the sympathy of the Government of Japan for those who were sacrificed in a series of explosions in London.

At the Embassy Mr. Hosoda expressed the deep condolences of the Government of Japan to the Government of the U.K.

Japan has pledged more than $1.5 million in private donations. The government of Japan has donated $200,000 in cash to the American Red Cross and some $800,000 in relief supplies -- from blankets to generators -- already are arriving to aid the most needy.

That's those 'militantly racist' 'alien values' in action.

According to figures on Wikipedia, 77% of the Japanese population is between 0 and 64 years of age so wouldn't have been born until after the war ended. And Littlejohn claims that he believes that:

It is wrong to visit the sins of previous generations on their modern descendants, although that doesn’t prevent the British Left constantly trying to make us feel guilty for centuries-old grievances, from the slave trade to the Irish potato famine.

And yet here he is, faced with the 'biblical-scale' devastation of the recent tsunami, dragging up decades-old grievances about the actions of some Japanese people. If he thinks it's wrong the visit the sins of previous generations, why mention the war at all?

This is an example of "churnalism" at its most depraved -- the story's byline reads only "Daily Mail Reporter," as if the anonymous hack couldn't bear to fess up to his or her lack of originality. The article proceeds to rephrase our sentences, lift our quotes verbatim, and even write snappy sidebars about the visa-seeking San Francisco-based immigrants -- Rosa Aguilar and Adolfo Lopez, you've gone international! -- profiled in our original story.

Check out our story versus theirs for yourself: There is absolutely no original reporting in the entire Daily Mail piece. Apparently the reporter thought he or she was absolved via a quick "SFWeekly.com reports" in the 18th paragraph. No link or anything. Wow, thanks.

Smiley then highlights a couple of other cases of Mail articles that look suspiciously like articles from other publications, before concluding:

It seems U visas are a topic that appealed to the paper's conservative, anti-immigrant editorial stance; the Mail's editors have been called to answer in the past by the British Parliament's human rights committee about critical coverage of asylum seekers...

C'mon, guys: All we're asking for is some link love and heavy attribution high up in the story. Then go ahead and take what you want. To borrow a British expression, what the Mail did -- it's just not cricket.

Friday, 18 March 2011

This article has been amended. It previously contained a graphic that correctly listed the latest annual number of non-EU nationals admitted to each of ten European countries. However, a second table was wrongly headed "Non EU citizens to each square kilometre" instead of "Number of people to each square kilometre". We are happy to correct this point.

On 14 March, the Sun, Mail and Metro all printed a story about Israeli model Orit Fox being bitten on the breast by a snake:

Going by the date-stamps of the comments on each article, it appears the Sun was first with this 'news' and the others mindlessly followed. Each article served up the same scant 'facts', a few blurry stills and an embedded video of the incident.

Daily Mail Reporter reveals:

...surgically enhanced Israeli model Orit Fox got more than she bargained for when the massive boa constrictor took objection to her over familiarity and reacted by biting into her breast.

However, it was the snake who came off worse because, while Ms Fox need a tetanus shot in hospital, the reptile later died from silicone poisoning.

It all sounds very unlikely - even if you accept a snake can die of silicone poisoning, you would think it would have needed to pierce the implant, which would surely have resulted in more extensive medical treatment for the woman than a 'tetanus shot'.

The Northern Health and Social Care Trust complained to the Press Complaints Commission that the newspaper had published an article which inaccurately reported that two people had been admitted and treated in Causeway Hospital following carbon monoxide poisoning.

And the case was resolved when the newspapers published the following:

On 11 August last under the headline "2 more poisoned", we reported that two women were admitted to and treated overnight at the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine shortly after a public safety warning had been issued concerning carbon monoxide poisoning following the suspected faulty installation of gas appliances.

At that time the hospital stated that it had no record of two women being admitted or treated in the hospital and we accept this.

The two women concerned said they had attended the A&E department because they had symptoms consistent with exposure to carbon monoxide gas and had been advised to seek urgent medical attention.

We have since been made aware that although the women were concerned they may have had CO poisoning, in fact, they did not.

Saturday, 12 March 2011

On 16th December 2010 we published an article on our front page and pages 4 and 5, making a suggestion that immediately after Amir Khan’s successful WBA world champion fight against Marcos Maidana in Las Vegas on 11th December 2010, Amir Kahn was joined by Katie Price for dinner and subsequently in his suite.

At that point, Katie Price had not become estranged from her husband Alex Reid. In fact, Amir Khan did not meet with Katie Price whilst in Las Vegas and has never, as alleged, sent indecent photographs of himself to Katie Price.We apologise to Amir Khan for any distress or embarrassment our story may have caused.

There are hundreds of such nasty, pointless articles on the Mail website, which criticise famous people - but particularly famous women - who dare go out in casual clothes, or without make-up or without looking exactly how the mean-spirited hacks on the Mail website demand they look at all times.

The Mail called Jefferies 'Mr Strange', 'the 'nutty professor' and 'Professor Strange'. He 'idolised a poet obsessed by death', they claimed. One front page splash carrying a large picture of Jefferies asked 'Was Jo's body hidden next to her flat?'; another wondered if he held 'the key to Joanna's murder'.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

In our 5 November 2010 article “Burkha ‘no more a threat than a nun’s habit’ says Cherie” we reported that Cherie Blair had, in a speech to Muslim women, defended the wearing of the Burkha and that this was a change from her previously stated opposition to the Burkha and to full-face veils.

In fact, Mrs Blair spoke in support of Muslim women’s right to wear their traditional hair cover which leaves the face uncovered. We accept that Mrs Blair made no comment about the Burkha and her views on face coverings had not changed. We apologise to Mrs Blair for this error and any confusion caused.

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Two national newspapers were today found guilty of contempt of court over the use of internet photographs.

In what are believed to be the first cases of their kind, the High Court in London ruled the contempt occurred when the Daily Mail and The Sun websites carried pictures on their websites of a murder trial defendant "posing with a gun".

The publishers were taken to court by Attorney General Dominic Grieve...Judge Michael Murphy QC, who presided at the trial, refused to discharge the jury after saying he was "quite satisfied" no members of the jury had been influenced by the internet.

Nevertheless, it was argued on the Attorney General's behalf that publication of the pictures had created "a substantial risk" that the trial could have been "seriously impeded or prejudiced" by jurors seeing them...

Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Owen said that - "notwithstanding that publication of the image of the accused with a pistol was a mistake" - there was a breach of the contempt laws under the strict liability rule.

"We conclude that the nature of the photograph created a substantial risk of prejudicing any juror who saw that photograph against the defendant Ward."

Lord Justice Moses, giving judgment on behalf of the court, said: "The criminal courts have been troubled by the dangers to the integrity and fairness of a criminal trial, where juries can obtain such easy access to the internet and to other forms of instant communication.

"Once information is published on the internet, it is difficult if not impossible completely to remove it.

"The courts, while trusting a jury to obey a prohibition on consulting the internet, have been concerned to meet the problem.

"This case demonstrates the need to recognise that instant news requires instant and effective protection for the integrity of a criminal trial."

The judges will consider what penalties and costs orders to impose on Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, and News Group Newspapers, publishers of The Sun, at a future date.

We noted there appeared to have been a lack of communication between the Express, Mattel and ELC resulting in the promotion going ahead when there was insufficient time or stock to satisfy demand. We understood that participants were told about the delay, but nonetheless considered that, because the toy was not available to collect as claimed, the promotion was misleading.

We considered that the Sunday Express and Argos had not demonstrated that they had made a reasonable estimate of demand for the board game and, moreover, had encouraged readers to purchase the Sunday Express as a precondition to obtaining the board game when the number of items was limited. We concluded that the promotion breached the code.

The ASA has ruled neither promotion should run again in its current form, but since these were one-off giveaways, they probably weren't going to be repeated anyway. And there's no penalty other than a written ruling that few people will ever see.

So while Richard Desmond may have removed his newspapers from the jurisdiction of the Press Complaints Commission, we can be sure the ASA will still be holding them rigorously to account. Ahem.